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An Huzzah! & Bravo!

“Fenris Badwulf is a man of the people. His prune mush has nourished the less fortunate souls of Mitchieville (soon to be renamed Fenrisville). His devotion to Set, The Snake God, has provided a spiritual example for us all. He provides shelter and canned salmon to our homeless raccoon Canadians. Fenris cares. Most importantly of all: Fenris Badwulf is mighty!”

So the simple brilliance of the Mitchieville writings via the nom de plume of the lunatic gadfly ‘Fenris Badwulf’ is a real gift to the blogosphere. Every offering is a trove; little masterpieces of Screwtape-style upside-down thinking tuned to the issues of the day, and the deeper matters of ultimate commitments, spiritual realities, consequences, and civilizational direction.

FaceBook fave him; read everything; if I could write that well or insighfully even 10% of the time, I’d consider myself a very lucky elf indeed. ~

~ NO, NOT ACTUAL CLOWNS, since I think they are Satan’s idea of ‘funny’. But where are the funny Canadian men of letters in the 21st century? Or the truly great comedians & comedic actors?

The other day one of the Binklings (who had been reading Maclean’s) asked “Why does Scott Feschuck have a job? Does anyone actually find him funny?” That thought stayed with me as I read the latest laugh-out loud Iowahawk entries, plus The Onion, and Cracked.com.

The Laughing Beaver

Canada has a long tradition of Anglo-Scottish self-deprecating humour– not so much Vaudeville or mocking others as Stephen Leacock or SCTV or Wayne & Shuster. Where are they now? Am I just missing teh funny Canuckistan these days? Russell Peters is OK as a side-dish, but where are the side-splitting articles– online or in print? Where the great side-splitting genius of the 1960s-1980s?

Jim Carrey is past-date, and seems to have nothing new to offer. Occasional feeble wheezes from reading Feschuk just won’t do. TV like This Hour Has 22 Minutes? Bitterly Leftist & political. Rick Mercer? Maybe. Newfoundland’s CodCo? Or Kids In The Hall? Not so much, actually. People still watch SCTV, after all.

Are we seeing some of the natural consequences of political correctness, which imposes outward and inward constraint, lest some self-appointed victim be offended? The Earle Human rights debacle– though not immediately about comedy itself– may be a sign and warning of what is.. well, NOT to come.

Ye Olden Days

Anciently, parody and satire was a fine Roman art– whether of the gentle or harsher kind under Lucilius, Juvenal, Horace and others.. even the politically dangerous comedy of Fabricius Veiento, or the semi-anonymous Satyricon by Petronius, both under the arbitrary tyranny of the Emperor Nero, who executed favourites as often as enemies.

Properly used, such arts are keenly political, and properly subversive of the vagaries or horrors of the status quo. Pompous tyranny is hilarious, even if to mock it is to risk censure, exile, or execution.

Wretched Witty Wreckery

In a recent surreal moment, former Monty Python member John Cleese woke up from his comfortable semi-retirement, looked about, and noticed that not only is the England which he and the rest of the Python savagely mocked now mostly dead, but that it is unlikely in 2011 anything like Monty Python could get off the ground.

“In a way he is symbolic of what went wrong with his clever, sarcastic generation at Oxbridge, riddled as it was with a strange mixture of self-satisfaction and cultural doubt. It loved to mock, but now finds itself adrift.”

Talented Wreckers

Gosh, thanks John– you and the boys got rich & famous from mocking post-war England, and pretty much stopped paying attention after the 1980s, when the rise of Islamism, humour & human-crushing political correctness, and bureaucratic busybodiness wrecked everything for Britain, and for all the comedians in your wake. Oooo.. edgy Margaret Thatcher jokes– really? Comedy is supposed to ridicule ‘what is’ by contrast with ‘what should be’, and the Python spirit became all acid and no fertilizer: all arson, no architecture.

After his orgies slowed down, Terry Jones has done some good TV; Cleese some odds and ends; Eric Idle lots of cameos and The Rutles; Terry Gilliam a heap of giant agonized movies; Michael Palin world travel documentaries and suchlike. But cutting-edge or topical comedy.. not so much.

Just in case you suppose I say the above as one unfamiliar with Pythonism, I once had most of the records memorized. I was teh hardcore Python-nerd.. but as a way of thinking or a form of entertainment, it ultimately failed me.

Canada All Sick

In any case, the death of humour is a symptom of intellectual & social rigour mortis in Canada– even the UK still produces real comedy and witty stuff (not including Eddie Izzard), if none of it dares tread outside the safety zone dictated by the chattering classes, same-sex speech codes, Muslim separatism, and the death of British freedom and parliamentary government.

Perhaps I’m terribly, terribly wrong– please let Teh Binks know of really good books, TV, articles by Canuckis in which Canadian humour– glorious and free– is allowed free rein and scope on every topic. Right now, in my opinion at least, the funniest man in Canada.. lives in New Hampshire! ~

~ BACK IN THE DAY, one of the worst Binks neighbourhood insults you could stick on someone was ‘goof’– not as in Goofy the Disney dog, but a failure, non-entity, and disappointment all wrapped up in one.

Did CIA Director Leon Panetta & Co. make the call to hit Bin Laden as POTUS empty-suit waffled? Was there in effect a DC palace coup on this issue, “primarily led by Leon Panetta, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, David Petraeus, and Jim Clapper”, with Obama and radical Valerie Jarrett on the other side?

What did Empty Suit know, or decide, and when?

It Gets Worse

If these speculations are deliberate misinformation, then are Hillary & her Clintonites making a pre-2012 political hit on Obama, to make him look even more unpresidential? And trying to use blogs to do it?

Either way, the bizarre and ever-changing White House account of the Bin Laden killing are making the POTUS look very bad, and wasting the biggest U.S. moral victory in a decade.

~ ITEM: Trial marriage on trial— Stylish, classy, tear-jerking and ultimately discouraging, is a sociologist’s verdict on the Royal Wedding: “The problem is that cohabitation doesn’t work like that. Cohabitation in general lasts an average of two years and is popular precisely because it provides easy access to sex without the legal, moral, and social commitments that marriage entails.”

~ TEH BINKS IS BELATEDLY WATCHING the Beeb coverage of the royal wedding, and feeling all happy & glorious. Back in the day, a younger Binks got up early ln to watch Chuck & Di in 1981– plus, I’m a strong believer in the British monarchy, the single oldest political institution on the planet, at 1500+ years old. Plus, Will & Kate will be King & Queen of Canada sometime (hopefully soon), and huzzah for that.

Yes, everybody else may be heartily sick of the wedding, or insta-bored by news older than a few days, but that’s why I’m watching it now. It’s a very happy-looking crowd, of many many different colours and countries. It’s a joy-making moment in a troubled England; a kind of global moment, and reminder of the abiding memory and influence of Britain around the world– even in unhappy and turbulent lands.

Off With Their Heads?

Every time the wretched republican spirit (this means you, Olivia Chow) raises the befanged head and growls about ditching the monarchy, it’s a horrid thing. It’s all about erasing the past, destroying memory of something better and older than the smelly little orthodoxies of would-be political masters, under the tyrant-powers of political correctness. Of course England has many crimes to answer for at the court of history, and the gate of heaven. Of course many people suffered under the hand of British masters around the world, not least in the ending of World War 2, when Churchill and Roosevelt and Truman fumbled the peace with the Soviet Bear, who gobbled up Eastern Europe, replacing the Nazis and worsening the situation.

Power is a difficult matter– being able to change things and make a difference and to make mistakes is all part of the same thing. The old saying has it: the only way to avoid mistakes is to do absolutely nothing. Judging the past by the skewed standards of the present– we forget that the future will likewise judge us for our since, crimes, blind-spots, abuses of power, and negligences.

Larger & Bigger

Every wedding is itself, and larger shapes and mysteries as well. Spiritually speaking, Will & Kate.. are also Adam and Eve, king & queen of creation, God & Israel, Christ and His Church, and the eternal union of God & his people in heaven forever, united in the bonds of eternal life. This imagery is shown forth in Eastern Orthodox wedding services, where the bride & groom wear crowns. This, of course, is the lost dimension in the era of romantic luuurve, narcissistic sexual anarchy, easy divorce, and general puzzlement about human nature & destiny & basic biology.

Perhaps the grandeur of this wedding can be a reminder that while we’re not all British royals, we can be– through Christ– royals of heaven, with a higher and brighter purpose and glory than that conceived of for us by advertisers & corporations, politicians, social engineers, progressitopians, and all the rest of the busybodies.

Danger! Beauty & Truth Ahead!

The other thing which was remarkable about the service: it was Christian, and beautiful. Set in the Westminster Abbey, it was the old 1662 Prayerbook wedding service with a few omissions; and the music (adult & youth choir & orchestral & organ) was truly glorious. The power of beauty and truth and haunting mystery still has the power to touch souls and remind people there’s more to everything than the flutter and flash of the moment. It’s why the progressives demand ugly churches, heejus vestments, boring or trite hymns, re-worded Bibles, puppet-sermons and all the rest: we can’t have thoughtfulness, introspection, peace & silence, dangerous questions, uncomfortable truths– or, heaven help us, God showing up to interfere with the shiny new communitarian masterplans.

Long Live The Queen! God bless Prince William & Princess Catherine! ~

P.S. Where has the time flown? Elizabeth 2.0 is 85, and Prince Phillip is 90?! Celebrating their 63rd Anniversary this year. Diamond Jubilee 2012!

P.P.S. Didn’t see a lot of obviously Muslim folks in the coverage– no burkas, nor groups of happy-looking turbaned folks. The terrorist-types were not in evidence either, being cowards, and knowing that the crowds would probably tear them to pieces given the chance.

Obama Could Botch A Fish-Shoot in a Barrel

“Uppity Woman has graciously agreed to share her latest insights into the mysterious depths of the Osama bin Laden fairy tale.

It’s all clear now, she writes….

Osama’s wife was killed. His wife was not killed. She was a human shield. She was not a human shield. She rushed at the SEALs and got killed. She rushed the SEALs and got shot in the calf. She did not rush the SEALs, she got shot in the calf in the cross-fire.

Osama fought back. He did not fight back. He made a wrong move. He didn’t move. He moved. He fought back. He was in a firefight. He did not fight back. He was armed. He was not armed.

Five people were killed. One was a woman. She was and was not a human shield. She was and was not Osama’s wife. She was and was not Osama’s aide’s wife. She was Osama’s courier’s wife. She rushed the SEALs when they entered. She did not rush the SEALs. She was killed in cross-fire. She got killed being a human shield. She was not a human shield. She’s dead.

Osama’s son Hamza was killed. No, it was his son Khalid. It probably doesn’t matter. He’s probably got a boatload of them and couldn’t even keep them straight himself.

The SEALs had little cameras on their helmets, and Barack and Everybody who is Anybody watched the mission unfold. They saw the whole thing but they didn’t see Osama get killed.

Osama is dead but his body is gone. Osama swims with the fishes. But before they put him in the plastic bag with the concrete block, they gave him a bath, wrapped him in a sheet and gave him a Muslim funeral ceremony. Then they put him in the bag with something very heavy and yelled to the sharks not to come around so the carp could get their turn. Then they gently dropped his carcass lowered him into the water.

There was a goat. There is always a goat, I’m telling you. The goat is doing fine now. Osama, not so much. But hey, at least they didn’t behead him on video. That would have been bad and offended somebody, unlike the beheading videos America had to endure.

Bush said he wanted Osama dead or alive. That was bad. Bush was a cowboy. That was bad. Obama said he wanted Osama dead or dead. That was good. Obama is a cowboy. That is good. Bush killed AQ’s number two a couple of times. That was bad. KILLER! KILLER! KILLER! Obama killed Osama. That was good. GO USA! USA! USA! OBAMA! OHHHHHH BAMAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Obama announced that Justice Has Been Served. Besides, it beats listening to his base bitch and moan if they took the cockroach alive and had to torture him over at Camp X-ray, which would have been bad if Bush did it, but would have been good if Obama did it because it would have been 11 Dimensional Chess. Obama is not like Bush. It just looks that way because of the Chess. K THX Shuddup.

~ YES, TEH BINKS feels a little besmirched over the whole Whorehouse Jack issue; but now that Daycare Dad is in charge of the opposition, it’s time. Time for the blogosphere, SunNews and the rest to to give Layton and the Dippers the full TSA treatment, factually speaking.

The Dippers are like those funky gourmet ‘blood-oranges’ a friend introduced to me a while back– orange on the outside, red on the inward parts. And just because there`s no mobs in the street, we need not be decieved– these are the far more sublte and polished ‘community organizer’ kinda commies, not smelly 1917 Russian Bolsheviks.

What’s the deal with the ‘secret’ NDP constitution?

Who what when where why how are radical U.S. unions pumping filthy lucre into NDP coffers?

How about the whole story on the Rub-N-Tug, and let’s not forget that retired cop, who may be in real trouble from the retroactive memory hole crowd over his revelations regarding Whorehouse Jack?

Let’s get the whole public housing fiasco into the daylight, whereby a rich ‘man of the pipples’ faked himself into Toronto public housing (for the poor) under his immigrant mother-in-law’s name.

We need to expose the longtime pro-Taliban & pro-terror connections of the Dippers. This party supports the rabid barbarians seeking to enslave the West, period. It goes back years, even before Taliban Jack himself.

The Canucki interwebs is already full of lotsa blogger footwork & factchecking on the Canucki soft-commie party: someone needs to do a Canadian Connect The Networks on them, and put the info together in a handy, useful, SunMedia friendly way to allow the public to get the full monty on the party that Jack built. ~

Binks

Random Binky Linkies

~ UNSPEAKABLY Bad Vestments.. Because Christian worship is not supposed to be about you …. (badvestments)

GreenEcoClimatology

“What was this pioneering eco-warrior’s sin – improperly sorted recycling bins? A secret stash of incandescent bulbs? No, the corporate pigs busted him just because he thoughtfully composted his girlfriend in 1977″

~ HOW CAN “scientific findings” be trusted when they translate directly into restrictive environmenal regulations? …. (classicalvalues)

~ THOSE WHO consumed the least salt had a 56 percent higher risk of death from a heart attack or stroke compared with those who had the highest consumption, even after controlling for obesity, cholesterol, smoking, diabetes, and other risk factors …. (drhelen.blog)

~ THE GREEN CHOICE? Number of Years it Takes to Break Even on some Hybrid Car Purchases: a mere 394 years of driving 12 000 miles each year …. (weaselzippers)

~ MARK SHEA— Down the Memory Hole: In which we question the dominant narrative that we are thousands of years smarter than our ancestors …. (markshea.blog)

~ AMERICAN DIGEST— “Now nearly a decade, “a low dishonest decade,” has past since the day after September 10 and the thing that looked like a man, the monster that set the events of the 11th in motion, has been expunged from the Book of Life” …. (americandigest)

Sorry, but the background thing looks like an evil Star Trek doomsday machine

~ HARPER will be expected to deliver on the expectations of social conservatives. Admittedly, it’s been these expectations that have been at the core of darkest nightmares of Harper’s detractors …. (nexusofassholery.blog)

~ GERRY HUNTER— “Before I was 35, I had occasion to stand by the bed of each of my dying parents. Don’t let anyone tell you that is an easy thing to do. But likewise, don’t let anyone pervert and corrupt you by coming to think it would have been better had they offed themselves to spare you that ordeal.” …. (lfbtl.wordpress)

~ SOME SAD NEWS— Harold Albrecht is the Conservative MP from Kitchener-Conestoga and is a principled pro-life, pro-family conservative. On Monday night as he and his wife Betty were preparing to go to the victory party — he had just won a third term — she suffered a spontaneous intracranial hemorrhagea …. (soconvivium)

~ REBRANDING EVIL— This story posted at Reuters Africa is about a scientist who thinks the concept of evil is obsolete and needs to be rebranded. It’s all a matter of empathy deficit disorder …. (merecomments)

~ BLUB BLUB BLUB BLUB— Rogers said the UK coalition government needed to go further in order to avoid financial catastrophe …. (cjunk.blog)

~ RIGHTEOUS COFFEE— “As I write, I see a sign announcing that the coffee I am drinking has been “ethically” sourced and batch roasted for me. Ethically? So there are objective ethical standards? And where do I find those standards?” …. (merecomments)

~ VENTRILOQUIST’S DUMMY— Gay British hysteric Andrew Sullivan demands that Sarah Palin prove that she gave birth to her youngest son but is willing to take Barack Obama’s word for it that Osama Bin Laden is dead …. (themcj)

~ INDEED: “When someone dies with as much on his soul as Osama bin Laden had on his, it should prompt us to drop to our knees and think about the fact that he had many opportunities every day to turn away from the path of destruction, to make the right choices that would bring light into the world instead of darkness.” …. (happycatholic.blog)

~ DAMIAN THOMPSON: “Blessed John Paul II saved the Catholic Church from going the way of the Anglican Communion” …. (blogs.telegraph)

~ FENRIS BADWULF— “Lucky you. You don’t have to put up with Christian missionaries beating at your door, pushing Bible papers at you. There won’t be a Bible in your motel bedroom, either. And Christianity is freely mocked on television. You can direct hatred at members of a religious group, the Christians” …. (mitchieville)

~ WITH THE RELEASE of the Birth Certificate, Today’s Burning Question Has Become, “What took him so long?” …. (americandigest)

~ STINKS TO HIGH HEAVEN— Department of Justice scuttled the prosecutions of Muslim Brotherhood-tied groups like CAIR, named co-conspirators in the largest terrorist funding trial in US history …. (atlasshrugs2000)

~ SO IF OBAMA Staged A Photo-Op And No One Cared, Is It Still A Conspiracy? …. (mypetjawa)

~ THE STEALTH H-60 Blackhawk– “Well, now we know why all of us had trouble ID’ing the helicopter that crashed, or was brought down, in the Osama raid.” …. (ghostofaflea)

~ TELEGRAPH: ‘For the public face of the White House to be someone so lacking in gravitas is a PR disaster.’ …. (pajamasmedia)

~ LIBERAL POLICIES put in place by liberal politicians to achieve liberal goals kill thousands of Americans each year. In the past half-century, liberalism may have killed up to 500,000 American citizens …. (orthodoxytoday)

~ RACERS VS. BIRTHERS— “Something still bothers us about the ‘birther’ kerfuffle,” James Taranto writes in his latest “Best of the Web” column. “Why the compulsion on the left to turn it into a racial matter?” …. (pajamasmedia)

~ I SUGGESTED that someone ask President Obama what his plan is for bringing down high gasoline prices …. (spectator.org)

~ IN THE NAME of “multiculturalism” we have crammed our cities full of people like Mona Eltahawy, who feel no love or allegiance to this country, but instead cling to their narrowly defined ethnic identities …. (theothermccain)

~ HAR DE HAR HAR— The Palace Guard Comedy Stylings of the Daily Show …. (pajamasmedia)

~ MASTERMIND Osama bin Laden dead – but no body. Now for an explosion of conspiracy theories; For the US to actually provide Osama bin Ladin’s body with the proper Islamic burrial is not just wrong, it is actively immoral! …. (senseofevents.blog, xanthippa)

~ DID “SON OF HAMAS” AUTHOR Mosab Hassan Yousef dupe the counter-jihad movement? “It sounds as if Mosab Hassan Yousef hasn’t modified his old Hamas views all that much… I am surprised that the Jewish groups that are so earnestly championing his cause don’t seem to have read his book very closely.”; Walid Shoebat Repudiates Mosab Hassan Yousef …. (jihadwatch.org)